13.3 Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way

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As mentioned, the common assumption is that beneficiaries will welcome you and your team as conquering heroes. Based on my experience, however, I look for beneficiaries to have two burning questions once they get wind of a pending initiative. From their point of view, these are:

What is this project going to do for me?
What is this project going to do to me?

These are legitimate questions, particularly the latter. Similar to Pavlov's dog, I am conditioned to react to this second question as the fore-shadowing of pushback. I recommend that you be on the lookout for it, too. If beneficiary resistance arises, you need to avoid the mistake so many project managers make, which is to dismiss this condition as simple-minded whining or resistance to change. Although beneficiaries do sometimes complain needlessly or hate change, they are not children you can patronize or bully. It is far more intelligent to treat them as highly skilled professionals who can play you many ways. They may:

Cooperate with you
Resist you overtly
Demand additional or modified benefits from you (also known as "scope creep")
Sandbag you (i.e., let you fail by not making you aware of risk)
Go over your head to the point of getting you relieved of command
Sabotage your project

The bottom line with beneficiaries is to treat them as partners. Doing so makes the lifeboat a little more tipsy and harder to steer through rough waters. But, as the previous list suggests, more harm than good can come from holding beneficiaries at arm's length.

Perhaps the best way to look at it is that beneficiaries see projects as potentially disruptive activities being funded with their own money. This attitude about money is similar to that found in some families, wherein some family members feel entitled to a significant share of family assets, regardless of fairness, previous participation, and so on. In other words, beneficiaries may feel they have as great a say in how your project money is spent as you and your team do because beneficiaries are part of the same dysfunctional corporate family! ^[1]

^[1]This situation is discussed further in the Chapter 9 (see Section 9.8, "Service Delivery and Cost Recovery").

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